The Best Movies That Are Kind Of About Christmas

You can do better than “Die Hard.”

Ben Affleck at the 2004 premiere of his movie “Surviving Christmas,” in Hollywood.

Mark J. Terrill / AP

You find yourself at a party where everyone is talking about favorite Christmas movies. Sure, you could say “Elf,” which you know in the deep ventricles of your cold and bitter heart is an uplifting film that inspires you annually. But instead, you go for the classic: “Oh, my favorite Christmas movie is ‘Die Hard.’”

What a clever thing you just did! You have cemented your credibility not only as a person who understands the subtext of action movies, but also an unconventional viewer who has surveyed the holiday canon and concluded that, nah, Bruce Willis saving Christmas is more your deal. At this point in the party you will light a cigarette and ride away from the conversation on your motorcycle.

This can get a little tedious — “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” is a way better movie anyway — but it starts a really fun conversation about the wide world of movies that are only slightly about Christmas. Maybe the movie takes place during the holidays but they’re not mentioned, or maybe there’s just an important scene at a holiday dinner table, but many movies are a sprig of holly away from being technically a Christmas movie. There have been excellent roundups of the top films of this weird little niche, but I wanted to go a little deeper and see what the data says about the true Best Sort-Of Christmas Movie. (The AV Club once called them “Christmas-adjacent,” and dang, that is perfect.)

Luckily, the obsessives at Wikipedia have assembled a rather comprehensive list of movies that are related to Christmas. We can — and will — argue about exactly how much Christmas is too much or too little Christmas to justify inclusion in this set.1 But in the end the list captures the batch of films with a primary plot that, if you stripped away or swapped out the holiday, could conceivably stand on its own.

So, which movie best articulates this brand of somewhat-Christmas movie?

Here are the films from the set that had both a Metacritic and IMDb score:

Clearly, a film’s IMDb user rating tracks heavily with the critic’s score, with a few slight differences. Films like “The Godfather” — a revered film, much of which takes place around Christmas — and “Fanny and Alexander,” an Ingmar Bergman film that has scenes set at Christmas, come out ahead.

If you’re just looking for the best in the set, here’s what we’ve got when it comes to Metacritic scores:

RANK

MOVIE

METACRITIC SCORE

1

Fanny and Alexander

100%

1

The Godfather

100

3

Carol

95

4

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

94

5

Toy Story

92

6

Goodfellas

89

7

Brazil

88

8

The English Patient

87

9

Das Boot

86

10

Ordinary People

85

10

Boogie Nights

85

12

Love Story

84

13

Babe

83

13

Moonstruck

83

15

Eastern Promises

82

16

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

79

16

Precious

79

18

Full Metal Jacket

78

18

2046

78

20

The Princess Bride

77

20

Kramer vs. Kramer

77

But this list just identifies which really, really good movies have a scene with a decorated tree or morbidly obese man in red. There’s room to go deeper here. After all, few people think “Christmas movie” when they think “The Godfather.”

To find the ultimate semi-Christmas-y movies, ones with more than just a whiff of nog, maybe it’s worth looking at movies that people want to watch in December more than usual. For films in the top 5,000, IMDb displays the popularity rank and how much that has changed over a week, derived from, among other things, their measurements of interest in a film’s page. Given what we know about the acceleration of Christmas music consumption, I’d estimate that any film in our Wikipedia set that saw its popularity increase in the past week — based on when I pulled the data for the week ending Dec. 7 — is likely one of the better Christmas-related movies out there.

Here are the films from the set that were in the top 5,000 in the first week of December, had a Metacritic score, and saw the biggest gains in popularity in the past week:

RANK

MOVIE

METACRITIC SCORE

IMDB POPULARITY RANK

RANK CHANGE IN PAST WEEK

1

Noel

29%

#1867

+2311

2

Surviving Christmas

19

904

1984

3

Fred Claus

42

293

1972

4

The Long Kiss Goodnight

44

1682

1967

5

Reindeer Games

37

2181

1850

6

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

71

1800

1683

7

Eight Crazy Nights

23

2393

1567

8

Scrooged

38

184

1334

9

Black Christmas (2006)

22

2408

1281

10

Mixed Nuts

14

2886

1185

11

Friday After Next

35

2573

1169

12

Are We There Yet?

27

2860

1156

13

Little Fockers

27

3100

1006

14

Star Trek: Generations

55

3667

1002

15

Ghostbusters II

56

1610

925

16

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

72

1084

879

17

The Family Man

42

1709

774

18

Happy Christmas

70

1789

569

19

Arthur Christmas

69

1073

551

20

Bridget Jones’s Diary

66

764

487

21

Ronin

67

2570

477

22

Love Story

84

2524

398

23

Bad Santa

70

289

385

24

The Mothman Prophecies

52

4601

372

25

While You Were Sleeping

67

1680

364

26

Die Hard 2

67

1919

358

27

You’ve Got Mail

57

1276

355

28

The Boat That Rocked

58

2433

352

29

First Blood

62

858

347

30

Eyes Wide Shut

68

372

284

“Noel,” a New York-based “Love Actually” wannabe with Susan Sarandon, comes in at No. 1 here, followed by Vince Vaughn’s “Fred Claus” and Ben Affleck’s “Surviving Christmas,” two holiday-themed family comedies about lonely men trying to buy happiness. I’d argue that these latter two shouldn’t be in this set at all, as the holiday is pretty essential to those plots, but we’re working from imperfect data, so ignore them if you want.

Then we get into the action flicks with slight ties to the holidays, and lo and behold, “Die Hard,” though ranked 414th on IMDb, isn’t to be found.2 The top action flicks here are “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” in which Geena Davis teams up with Samuel L. Jackson to kill stuff after overcoming her amnesia during holiday prep, and “Reindeer Games,” the movie where Ben Affleck carries out a heist on Christmas Eve.3 John McClane’s reappearance in “Die Hard 2” does make the list, though, so maybe you should be the innovator who claims that sequel as your favorite Christmas movie at the holiday party.

“Eight Crazy Nights,” Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah movie, makes the list, because what could be more “sort of related to Christmas” than Hanukkah? In fairness, given that the Festival of Lights started the day before I pulled the data, it may be higher now than we’d expect later in the year.

Both “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” also make the top 30, which leaves me personally satisfied with this ranking.

Those furiously scanning at home should know that “Love Actually” does not make this list because it is one of the most popular baseline films in the whole set. In the past week, though, it jumped 30 spots to be the 60th most popular film. That’s good to hear, because “Love Actually” is awesome.

Still, I’ve never heard of some of the top films. “Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale,” seriously? What on earth is —

Oh.

Wait, seriously —

Oh my god.

This is the greatest film I have ever heard of. Screw “Die Hard,” this should be your favorite Christmas movie. If you need me for the next hour and 24 minutes or so, I’ll be watching this Finnish movie about Santa murdering people.

Footnotes

I like it when the Talk page becomes a rhetorical knife fight, but this page is lacking vehemence. Wikipedians, get in there — the article probably needs some crowdsourced refining.

This is because it didn’t have a large enough jump. It’s slightly more popular than usual this week, but it’s always pretty popular. Slightly relatedly, same goes for “Trading Places.”

Two Ben Affleck movies in the top five! Does Ben Affleck really like Christmas? I want to know more here. If you know Ben Affleck, know how to reach Ben Affleck, or are Ben Affleck, you know how to reach me. I want answers.